


Man on Fire

by imparfait



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 03:29:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15501342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imparfait/pseuds/imparfait
Summary: It starts with a kiss, a broken spell, and the entirety of Dean’s world shatters like glass.





	Man on Fire

It starts with a kiss, a broken spell, and the entirety of Dean’s world shatters like glass, shards sharp and too hard to sweep away. In the moment, he thinks _fuck_ , and backs away, like space would somehow save them, like three feet would make him forget how good Sam’s lips tasted. 

They don’t talk about it. Sam packs away the witch killing bullets, Dean burns the hex bags, and they bury what’s left of the witch in a stand of trees behind the old gas station where Dean killed her. Where she cursed them. Where Dean kissed Sam. 

In the Impala they’re silent, eating up the miles between Pine Bluffs and Lebanon with Zeppelin up loud enough that Dean can’t think, can’t process what happened, and that’s better. The space between him and Sam on the bench seat is a canyon. Dean can’t look at him, can’t speak to him. He presses the gas harder, wills the miles to roll by and the Impala to not be quite as hungry as she usually is. 

They stop for the night at some busted roadside, along I-70, east of Stratton. Dean’s bone-tired and Sam’s hungry, so he stays back at the motel, entombed in cheap cotton while Sam runs for pizza. They eat with the TV on. Fresh Prince reruns that Dean remembers watching years ago fill the gap between them. He drinks too much whiskey, still says nothing—Sam tries, he does, and Dean gives stilted one-word answers when he must. His eyes feel sand-filled, his muscles ache, and his head throbs. When he’s too tired to lift his glass he falls asleep, just before midnight.

He dreams of it, because of course he does. Sam’s disappearance, the witch—he knows it’s the damn witch. She’s been leaving a trail of bodies all over town, not dead but nearly. An old Living Dead curse from Babylonia. They’ve been splitting their time between trying to cure the curse and trying to find the damn bitch who was doing it. 

But then Sam’s gone and there’s a hex bag of mint, sage, and babies’ bones hidden under the TV stand in the motel room. All Dean has room for in his head is white-hot rage because he didn’t fight off an archangel to lose Sam six months later. 

He wakes up sweaty and shivering, hand clenched around his pistol. He doesn’t try to go back to sleep. He pulls himself out of the blankets, plants both feet on the floor and stares across the room at Sam. _He’s_ asleep, face soft and smooth, lips parted, and Dean thinks about the fucking witch again, how much his whole body felt like it was on fire when he saw Sam laid out on a pentagram in the empty store room of that gas station. 

He beat the living shit out of the bitch, hurt her until she was coughing up her own blood. She laughed. 

_Fix him_ , Dean demanded. 

_I can’t_ , she answered. _Neither can you._

He shot her. One between the eyes, watched her fall backward, arms wide, an oozy pool of brain and blood spreading out on the concrete under her that would never be enough payment for taking Sam. He screamed in furious panic and thought _shitshitshit_ , because what was he supposed to do without Sam?

Dean tries to shake the memory out of his head but it won’t leave, the sight of Sam splayed out in the pentagram slotting into to rotation with the rest of the nightmares he sees when he closes his eyes. He stares at Sam, watches the shadows dance across his face for a while. Dean doesn’t want to try to sleep again, doesn’t want to watch the kaleidoscope of deaths that lives in the dark behind his eyelids. How many times is he going to have to watch Sam die? It doesn’t matter because Sammy isn’t dead, he’s asleep in the bed across from Dean, warm and breathing and safe and this time it didn’t take Dean’s soul, or bending the will of heaven and hell to bring him back. Just a kiss. Which is maybe worse, because Dean would rather sell his soul than leave it hanging bare out in the air, for Sam to suck in a gasping breath against his lips and open his eyes to see, _fuck_ , to see Dean slumped over him, tears tracking down his cheeks.

His guts twist up into a tangled knot of guilt in his belly. Sam isn’t supposed to know. He wasn’t supposed to open his eyes, breathe out into Dean’s mouth and suck in the air between them. Secrets, Dean’s fucking _great_ at secrets. He lives comfortably wound up in them, has collected a library of them inside his head. This was the first one, his own original sin, that the pulsing need for Sam under his skin wasn’t something born from blood or family but something else, something dark that burns him up from the inside.

But now there it is, hanging in the dead air between them, filling the chasm Dean never meant to dig, shifting the earth with his lips. He wants Sam to wake up and break his face, pummel him into the ground, anything—anything but this, the stilted silence he tried to fill with Zeppelin in the car, the way Sam wordlessly passed him a beer, careful not to let their fingers touch. The way Sam treated him like _he’d_ been cursed, not the other way around.

He thinks about waking him, starting the fight himself, letting Sam punch penance into Dean’s skin, but he doesn’t because the deepest part of the secret is that Dean breathes for Sam, only for Sam, and breaking him is out of the question.

The morning light breaks through the slats in the blinds and Dean wonders if he slipped back into sleep because morning took forever and came all at once. He watches the light slide over Sam’s face, dull and dim but brighter with every passing moment. Sam snuffles, the heart wrenching noise that Dean always pretends not to hear when Sam is waking up, but it lives in his good dreams, in the place where he lets himself breathe. 

Sam turns onto his back, sleep-slow, all gangly, tangled limbs. Dean wants to kiss him— _again_ , he thinks, for the first time ever. He wants to kiss him again, and that punches a hole through the morning quiet.

Sam opens his eyes. He blinks, turns back on his side, and stares across at Dean. Neither of them say anything. Dean wonders if his sleepy, tired eyes and the empty bottle of Four Roses says what he can’t: he didn’t kiss Sam out of anything but selfish greed, his own want. He didn’t know it would break the spell. Didn’t think it would do anything but maybe staunch some of the pain stabbing at his heart. 

He thinks the litany of things he can’t say, the words ground so deep they’re seared on his soul— _I love you, I need you, I want you to be safe_ —and he wonders how things will ever be the same, now that Sam’s first breath came from Dean’s own lungs. He’s good at pain, used to it living in the corners of his head, but having his soul stripped bare is new to him, uncomfortable. 

Sam shakes himself free of the blankets. Stares at him. Breathes, which is more than he thought he would get, more than he supposes he deserves. 

“Dean.” Sam says it easy, a name that’s fallen off his lips more times than maybe any. 

“You okay, Sammy?”

Sam shifts again, shimmies up against the pillows, stares across the space between them like it isn’t there, like Dean didn’t remake their entire existence twenty-four hours ago. 

“You kissed me,” Sam says. 

Dean wishes he hadn’t finished off the whiskey. He’s too tired for this, too wrecked, still not ready after a lifetime of keeping his peace. There’s nothing for him to say, no easy way out, only the hard way, and he can’t say the words. 

He manages a yes, so soft it sounds like a breath. He isn’t looking up, can’t see Sam’s face, but he can imagine what’s there. Instead, Dean stares at his crooked fingers, his ragged nails, the stains on his sleep pants. Anything but Sam. So he hears it instead of sees it--Sam sliding the covers off, the creek of the mattress as he stands. The pad of Sam’s feet against worn out carpet as he crosses the space between them in two shaky strides.

Sam tilts his face up. Forces Dean to look, and it’s like looking into the sun. Dean squints at him. Sam’s expression is open, easy. There’s the traces of a smirk playing on his lips. 

“You _kissed_ me,” he says again.

For once in his life, Dean doesn’t have a quick remark, a single joke to play. This isn’t funny. This is his darkest secret, balancing on a knife’s edge, ready to tumble over into a place where Sam isn’t safe under his eye, where Sam hates him. He’s barely keeping himself together.

“Yeah, Sammy.” Dean looks away, toward the bedside table where the detritus of a life shared lay scattered. Empty bottles, charging phones, books stacked haphazardly in a tower. He thinks about it halved and wants to cry.

“Dean,” Sam says again. He shakes him. “Look at me.”

Dean doesn’t, he doesn’t have the chance, because Sam’s lips crash into his and he gasps in a breath. It’s all Sam, tastes of him, smells like him, and it’s better than the first time.


End file.
